Marketing risks can reap rewards to business

Good marketing can take an innovative product to the next level, but often the most memorable marketing campaigns are ones that also come with the most risk.

When planning a new launch or rollout, some of Atlanta’s best marketers take careful steps to weigh the risks — and benefits — associated with their marketing strategies to ensure they are sending the right message to their targeted audience.

“With any piece of marketing, you run the risk of a low return on your investment, or a campaign that just flops; you also run the opportunity of big rewards, bringing on new awareness and new clients. With a unique and creatively strong marketing campaign, those opportunities polarize into larger successes and losses,” said Karen Robinson, executive vice president who oversees marketing for Norcross-based NanoLumens, a 2012 Marketing Award For Excellence (MAX) Awards finalist. “That being said, without even a little risk, there are hardly any rewards. If you’re doing the same thing that everyone else is, you look just like everyone else and lose engagement with your potential client.”

NanoLumens creates large-format indoor LED displays aimed at transforming retail, corporate and public spaces. Its product line features fixed LED displays that can be created in any shape, size or curvature, whether a flat display in its NanoSlim, a curved display in its NanoCurve, or even a full cylinder or column wrap with the NanoWrap displays.

In order to market its one-of-a-kind product, NanoLumens educates audio-visual consultants, integrators and rental companies. It also works to raise awareness about its product through social media and blogger engagement.

“Marketing, like any business deal, is an investment; with any investment there is risk. You can alleviate some of the risk in marketing by diversifying your marketing campaigns while staying under the umbrella of your brand. Your messaging should be centralized, but the delivery of that messaging can be diversified,” Robinson said. “By diversifying where you share your message, i.e. through social media, PR, blogging, Web content and static ads, you allow yourself more platforms on which to experiment. If one fails, you have other, strong brand outlets that continue to carry your company messaging while you reassess your struggling campaign and try something new.”

“Each NanoLumens display is crafted with the individual client in mind, and is made to bring a bit of imagination into reality,” Robinson said. “We also back up our displays with the industry’s strongest warranty, showing that we believe in the longevity of our product and its effectiveness for the user. That same spirit of ingenuity, creativity and devotion is what we put into our marketing, and why our marketing and in turn our company are successful.”

In 2012, Georgia-Pacific LLC also infused its creativity and devotion into its Brawny paper towel brand, earning it a 2013 MAX Award. When the company needed a way to reach consumers on a small budget, it turned to an emotional cause marketing effort. The company built on its image of strength by partnering with the Wounded Warrior Project, a nonprofit that provides services to severely injured service members as they transition back to civilian life.

“Brawny has always stood for strength and toughness so in Wounded Warrior we really saw the opportunity to connect what the brand stands for with the tenacity exemplified by the Wounded Warrior organization,” said Lanier Thomas, director of marketing for the Brawny brand at Georgia-Pacific.

During the initial stages of the campaign, Georgia-Pacific gathered a team to brainstorm ideas. The company knew it needed to ensure the partnership didn’t alienate its consumer base and that it resonated with its target audience.

“We like to get a broad variety of cross-functional team members in a room and really talk out our ideas and try to understand where we may have knowledge gaps, what more we may need to go learn, and just assess the upside of the idea and the potential watch-outs,” he said.

Ultimately, discussion and research suggested the campaign had the potential to influence its audience to not only improve business, but also provide support for the needs of injured service men and women. Georgia-Pacific tested the campaign on a small scale before launching it nationally.

“One of the mental models within Georgia-Pacific that we follow is this idea of experimental discovery so we took a test-and-learn approach with this cause marketing effort,” Thomas said. “We conducted a small scale test in the Northeast to determine the relevance and consumer impact before we committed to the full national launch.”

The campaign included two major focuses, to raise awareness for the Wounded Warrior Project and to improve consumer opinion of the Brawny brand. Going into its third year in 2014, the campaign has raised more than $1.4 million in donations.

“We’ve seen that we’ve positively impacted perception of the Brawny brand with the millennial generation, which is a new target for us that we are trying to attract,” Thomas said.